| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores logics of erasure and invisibility in Latin America’s historical and cultural record during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Attuned to recent frameworks in decolonial, critical Indigeneity, and science studies, my study elucidates myriad forms of trans-Atlantic and trans-American knowledge-production, long-lasting, pseudoscientific rhetorics of race, and scientific colonialism in New Spain (Mexico), Cuba, Spain, and the Early U.S. My study analyzes the tropes of colonial processes in Latin America through a comparative lens, with a focus on the collection. To unpack overlapped and sedimented discourses about identity, race, and Indigeneity, my study approaches the act of collecting in a broad sense. The collection takes the form of a cabinet, a museum, catalogs, natural histories, and travel accounts that rely heavily on artifacts, “monuments,” the explorations of material objects, as well as aesthetic representations in literary works. Thus, my study traces the emergence of new methods or processes of knowledge-production in which objects, transformed into artifacts, were territorialized within contexts of increasing connectivity. In five chapters, I fold together poetry, history and natural history, proto-anthropological debates, archival documents, scientific collections, and images to elucidate the local and global means through which racial identities and racialization were negotiated and mediated in different contexts. As part of the study of three-dimensional crossroads, my study underscores forms of narrative scaffolding that later on produced different dynamics of creole self-fashioning and primordialist fantasies that embody changing notions of identity, race, the nation, and empire. | |
